One of the simplest and least expensive and practical suspension upgrades you can make on a pickup is the addition of a leveling kit.

Leveling kits, for the most part, are very easy to install. The don’t affect the handling or ride quality of the truck. And the additional couple inches of front-end lift makes room to run tires that are a couple inches taller than factory without clearance issues.

The latter is the reason we slid a Daystar Chevy/GMC Quiet Ride Leveling Kit (KG09105BK) under the nose of our 2011 GMC Sierra Crew Cab 4×4, affectionately known as Project Bedrock.

Daystar was the first to enter the leveling kit market in 1995. Though there have been many companies that have entered the market since, Daystar claims their leveling kits offer many advantages that the others can not claim:

No Metal-On-Metal Contact – Daystar uses Polyurethane material in its Leveling Kits for a reason: It’s an insulator. It absorbs the Noise, Vibration, and Harmonics (NVH) that come from the suspension and avoids transmitting them to the passenger compartment. All competitors use steel or aluminum in their Leveling Kits.

Lifetime Warranty – All of Daystar’s Leveling Kits are backed by a Lifetime Warranty. In the unlikely event you experience a problem with a Daystar product, we’ll take care of it.

Made in the U.S.A. – All of our leveling kits are manufactured at our plant located in Phoenix, Arizona. In-house manufacturing ensures a level of quality control that no one else can match….and we have the ISO9001 certification to prove it.

Top-Mount Easy-Install Design – Most late-model vehicles have gone to a strut type of front suspension. Most of Daystar’s strut applications are a Top-Mount design, meaning that our components bolt to the top of the factory strut assembly. This type of leveling kit does not preload the factory coil spring, so factory ride quality is maintained and installation requires only simple hand tools.

The addition of the Daystar GMC leveling kit paved the way for us to run LT285/70R17s on the truck, giving it another inch of ground clearance over the stock tires. A win win in our book. — Bruce W. Smith